Description of the picture:
View of the environs of Brussels – David Teniers the Younger. The beginning of the 1650s. Canvas, oil. 26.6×38.4
In one thousand six hundred fifty one Teniers, a pack of court painters of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, moved from Antwerp to Brussels. In the early 1650s, he painted a picture in which he captured the surroundings of this city. In the depths of the landscape depicts the real buildings and churches of Brussels. One of them can be identified: on the right, on the horizon, you can see the Church of Our Lady on Zafel (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe Ten Zavel). A close-up of the same architectural structure is depicted in Teniers’ composition “Shooting Birds in Front of the Church of Our Lady on Zafel” (1652, Museum of the History of Art, Vienna).
Genre Elements in the painting “View of the environs of Brussels” minimized. The figures of the three talking peasants (in the foreground right), with their bright clothes, enliven the landscape, solved in a bluish-green tone."
